Coding is employed in communications systems for a variety of purposes. Among these are the improvement of transmission reliability, DC balance, the detection of errors, and the correction of errors. U.S. Pat. No. 5,699,062 to Widmer discloses a transmission code having local parity. The '062 patent describes a method and apparatus for converting 8-bit bytes to a set of coded 10-bit bytes such that if an error accrues in a bit location of a particular coded byte, it generates an invalid coded byte. Further, the set of coded bytes includes a comma which is confined to a single byte. The bit sequence of the comma is singular, i.e., the sequence of bits corresponding to the comma cannot be found in any byte sequence with another alignment relative to the byte boundaries. Vertical parity is used to identify the bit location of errors within a byte known to be erroneous.
The '062 patent does not provide a specific assignment of source vectors to encoded vectors. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a coding implementation that can be efficiently implemented in hardware.